Standard Ban List 22.09

This time around, we’re facing a tough nut to crack. Even though we expected Endurance to be a significant addition to the Shaper tool kit, how strongly it warped the entire metagame was still surprising to us. So, after following the exciting meta shifts over the course of three Continentals and the Intercontinental Championship, we found ourselves facing a very fundamental decision going into the deliberations for the Ban List Update for the World Championship: Do we need to ban Endurance, or is there an alternative? We would rather avoid having to ban a freshly released card, especially one that is enabling a lot of player interaction and dynamic games. It might be that, eventually, we will still have to resort to that option, but for now we believe we have found a viable alternative route that also tackles a separate problem in the game.

Summary of Standard Ban List 22.09 Changes

Effective Date: 23 September, 2022

Rezeki banned
PAD Tap banned
419: Amoral Scammer unbanned
Preemptive Action banned
Archived Memories banned

Click here to jump to the full ban list.

Explanation of Changes

The goal for this ban list update is to tackle the steady rise of drip economy we saw over the last year. Cards like Rezeki went from being singleton includes to an entire economic engine fueling decks like Big MaxX, which were particularly good at bringing many copies of them into play. For that reason, we decided that from the multitude of ubiquitous drip cards, Rezeki and PAD Tap were the best to target, as with their low influence cost, they saw play in all factions.

The intended consequence of these bans is that Runner economy becomes more finite again, thus enabling Corp strategies that try to bind the Runner in a long economic downwards spiral, as seen in Sokka234’s APAC-winning list. To counteract these, we are banning Preemptive Action and Archived Memories, to limit Corp recursion and force them into more proactive game plans and create more dynamic and interesting games.

Finally, since we strive to reevaluate banned cards when their circumstances change, we have looked at 419 and determined that it is not the powerhouse it was back when it was pushing all alternatives out of the meta. The Criminal identities lend themselves for more distinct play styles than back when 419 dominated the faction: Sable allows for Deep Dive to shine, Zahya makes a lot of money in tag-me strategies, Steve pressures HQ by endlessly asking you to choose between two surprisingly similar looking cards… They all do something special and significantly different from 419’s economic pressure. Especially with PAD Tap out of the picture, 419 should be safe to return as one viable option in the Criminal faction among many.

There were quite a few cards that came up in discussions as possible solutions for the problems arising from the broad ban of drip economy: Bellona with its strong economic swing both on steal and on score, Luminal Transubstantiation for fueling the faction that was previously struggling trashing PAD Taps the most, Mti Mwekundu, mainly for the satisfaction of the thought of making spiders appear out of nowhere on the Endurance… There were a lot of options for this update, but all of them with different downsides that needed to be discussed and weighed, which was not viable with the time to Worlds ticking down. However, we think the list we arrived at should create a more healthy metagame and we look forward to seeing the meta unfold at the World Championship in three weeks.

If the thought process behind the ban list sounds interesting to you and you would like to play a part in its conception in the future, look here to apply for SBL playtesting!

Standard Ban List 22.09

Effective Date: 23 September, 2022

Changes from Standard Ban List 22.08 appear in bold. Strikethrough denotes unbanned cards.